Five times fake bands got more publicity than the real thing
There’s a lot of money to be made in being a successful touring band. Regardless of whether you’re rock, punk, indie, or anything else, there’s nothing like selling out crowds everywhere you go.
This is something that artists everywhere are desperate to achieve, and for a lot of bands, it simply doesn’t happen. What do you do when that’s the case? Sure, it makes sense to keep making music to advance your career, but have you ever considered simply pretending to be a band that you’re not?
I’m not talking about becoming a tribute band; you’re thinking too small. No, you should just completely take over the identity of the band whose career you wish you had. A group in Russia has gone viral for doing exactly that recently, but it’s not a new phase. There have been bands impersonating other acts for decades now, and a lot of the time they wind up doing better than the artists they’re impersonating.
So, let’s have a look at these fraudsters and see what kind of success they had following their musical heists.
Five times bands impersonated other bands
Angine de Poitrine
Angine de Poitrine seems to be taking the musical world by storm at the moment. Who would have thought that the next new thing in music would be confusing surrealism? It’s difficult to understand the reason why it’s resonating so much with people, but music lovers from near and far have been flocking to watch this experimental duo do what they do best.
Perhaps even stranger than the band’s outfits and sound, though, is the fact that they were recently impersonated by a duo in Russia. Yes, an Instagram post from May 17th showed that a duo pretending to be the band played to a packed-out room at a bar called Escapist in Moscow.
The band’s art director, Sam Murdock, spoke about the incident. “There’s a fake [version of the] band touring Russia already, with the costumes and everything, and they keep tagging the band, and they don’t even say it’s not a real band,” he said, “And they just have a one-neck guitar.”
Redbone
You know Redbone, they’re the beloved band known for their classic hit ‘Come and Get Your Love’. It’s a pretty timeless tune, made even more so thanks to its inclusion in a popular movie franchise, and the result is that people from all over the world are keen to head to a Redbone show whenever it’s passing through town.
Keen to take advantage of these flocking crowds, a band of impersonators got together to play at the Butte-Silver Bow Fair in Montana. When the actual band’s manager, Ron Kurtz, found out about the show, he was quick to call out the fraudsters. “I’ve been in the business for 40 years,” he said, “and I’ve never run into anything this blatant”.
Elvis Presley
Love him or hate him, Elvis Presley was one of the biggest names in music and helped to make what we now know as rock ‘n’ roll commercially popular. Because he was such a huge player in the musical world, a lot of people had conspiracy theories about whether he had actually died, as a duet released by Jerry Lee Lewis had a contribution from someone who sounded remarkably like the King.
Sun Records capitalised on this and began using the unnamed singer more and more in a bid to make people think that Elvis might still be alive. The singer was called Orion, who dressed glamorously and wore a mask. It certainly had all the components of a conspiracy, and it kept fans of Elvis on tenterhooks. The singer was eventually revealed to be a man called Jimmy Ellis. He wasn’t blatantly pretending to be Elvis, but the speculation certainly must have helped his career.
The Zombies
The Zombies were on the verge of stardom after they released ‘Time of the Season’. They were due to release their record Odessey and Oracle, but then found themselves on the receiving end of cunning minds in the music industry. It was Delta Promotions who opted to capitalise on the band’s popularity and set up their own makeshift versions, which hailed from Michigan and Texas.
It would have been fine if the band were being marketed as a tribute, but that wasn’t what they were doing. They were travelling around the US and selling tickets to plenty of their shows, with fans turning up thinking they were the real thing. The real Zombies only caught wind of the impostors when their former band member, Paul Atkinson, went down to a show and managed to capture the performance on film.
The Velvet Sundown
Okay, this outfit wasn’t actually impersonating a specific band; however, they were impersonating actually being real. They managed to amass millions of listeners on streaming platforms and received coverage from major music outlets, despite being completely fake, as they would later come out and admit that they were AI.
The band confirmed on social media that they were a “synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualised with the support of artificial intelligence”. They continued, “This isn’t a trick […] It’s a mirror. An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI”.
